1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system including a printing apparatus that operates by receiving print information from a host computer and a printing control method and, more particularly, to a printing system including a printing apparatus having a printer control function called a printer description language, printer control commands, and the like, and software programs called a printer driver or a print spooler or print processor prepared for that printing apparatus on the host computer side, and a printing control method.
2. Related Art
As recent printing apparatuses, printers that can finely print and record data used in multimedia processing in the fields of CAD (computer aided design), CG (computer graphics), DTP (desktop publishing) in design and business fields, and the like are commercially available.
Such printers include a PDL printer which draws (rasterizes)an image from intermediate language codes, generated by interpreting PDL (page description language) codes received from a host computer, at high speed using hardware or software, and an image printer which receives image data which is rasterized by a host computer and has a data format that the printer can print, since some printer functions are removed to attain a cost reduction.
The PDL printer receives information in a page as PDL codes, generates intermediate language codes, and draws an image after codes for one page have been received.
Characters are drawn by using font data stored in an internal ROM of the printer or using image data which is obtained by mapping font data and received from a host computer. Recently, in order to obtain the same print result as that displayed on a display, the image data received from the host computer is often used.
However, when all the characters are transferred as image data from the host to the printer, the load of a mapping process in the host and the transfer data volume increases. Further, large memory capacity is required in the printer for storing the received image data.